Finally, a chance to play Firefly on a table that's big enough for
the game! (With images;
cc-by-sa on
everything.)

Three people joined me for a game of
Firefly
with all the promo cards and expansions (specifically including
Pirates and Bounty Hunters,
the first chance I've had to put it on the table). We played Harken's
Folly, rather than one of the story cards designed to provoke player
conflict, but did have all the new cards in the decks to see if it
would happen anyway.

Both the Interceptor and the Walden were in play, with the Artful
Dodger and one standard Firefly. I was planning to go all-out for
piracy to build up my cash reserves, so took the Walden, but wasn't
able to get Sash to make it more lucrative; he ended up on the
Interceptor, Walden got Marco, Serenity got Malcolm, and the Dodger
got Jubal Early. (Yeah, this isn't the exact setup sequence, but never
mind.)

Things started off fairly smoothly. There were quite a few piracy jobs
in the early discards so they got into people's hands; I picked up a
warrant quite quickly, which I never got round to doing anything
about.

One early piracy job went badly awry (the odds slightly favoured the
attacker, but with rolls of 1 vs 6 this wasn't going to work), and we
were a bit more careful about them after that; quite a few happened
later on, though I managed to avoid becoming a victim, mostly because
Jubal ended up being very unlucky at boarding.

In most of the games I've played before, people have been fairly
polite about moving the Reaver Cutter and the Alliance Cruiser. Not so
this time! They were our major weapons against each other. I had a Cry
Baby that I never had to use, but got hit by the Reavers quite a bit.

Sash in the Interceptor was doing pretty well, and got the four solid
reputations before anyone else (I was still on two). But he may have
tried for the second goal a bit too early; he struck some very poor
luck; he ended up with his whole crew disgruntled, and Marco and
Malcolm swooped in to hire them away.

He had to keep going back and forth to try to recruit more crew to
take on the Misbehaves, while the Reavers hung around eating
everything that moved. Meanwhile I'd managed to bolster my crew a bit
more to something like 7 fight, 7 tech, 5 negotiate, then completed my
last two jobs in short order, and was able to sneak in while the
Cruiser was distracted and get the second goal.

After that it was simply a matter of getting to the final goal sector,
passing a three-Misbehave challenge, and rolling a 3+ to win (I didn't
have quite as much Negotiate as I might have liked).

Yes, the dinosaur is my own addition.

An awful lot of characters seemed to get killed or arrested this time
round (and River never showed up at all). I usually manage to avoid
crew kills completely, but even I lost quite a few, generally to
Reavers. While we'd had quite a bit of Piracy, nobody tried to collect
on a Bounty, which was slightly disappointing; something to think
about trying next time. Also, nobody spent time mining for particular
characters or upgrades; I suspect that the combination of bigger decks
with a sense of time pressure from our rivals helped there.

I didn't make a note of how long we took to play, but judging by image
timestamps it was probably a bit over three hours: with one player who
hadn't played before and two who'd played only once, I reckon that's
not bad going, and for me at least the game didn't overstay its
welcome.

Although Piracy jobs weren't a huge part of the game, I definitely
felt we had more opportunities for interaction this time, and there
wasn't the same feel of a runaway winner (though I thought Sash had it
at first, and in the end it may have been I).

We went on to try my Expo purchases:
Hanabi, which had
its usual confusing effect on people who haven't played it before but
from which we pulled out a 20-point marginal win, and
Love Letter,
which reminded me very strongly of
Coup but with a more
whimsical air. Having just a single-card hand makes play go faster,
and while I'm not usually a fan of player elimination the rounds are
short enough that I was reconciled to it here. I think I'll probably
keep playing both this and Coup. (I came last.)

We finished the day with a game of
Tsuro, not one I
play very often these days but still distinctly enjoyable and of
course visually gorgeous.

I should do this more often. But I always say that. At least the
Automated Geek Herder exists so that it's
easy to pick the date that can be made by the largest number of
people.